In today's mail I received a letter and a survey from the Catholic Alumni Partnership. They were asking about the time I spent in a Catholic School in Central/South Jersey, and they were looking for donations based upon my experiences.
I shuddered. I have no fond memories of that particular school. I can't paint all Catholic educational institutions with that brush, but that one school is one that I would rather forget and I was surprised by the level of bad feelings that the letter brought out in me. I have to ask myself why I wasn't completely able to let it all go.
I attended public kindergarten in Brooklyn, NY, and was transferred into Catholic school for first grade. I had a good educational experience in grades 1-6. Even though my home life was crazy, my school years were good. Teachers encouraged my reading and pushed me so far ahead that by 6th grade I had read everything the school had to offer. I was a Girl Scout, I joined the bowling team, and I enjoyed learning. I remember arguing with my 6th grade religion teacher over the idea of animals and souls - I believed (and still do) that animals have a soul, and the teacher stuck to the Catholic hardline saying that they don't.
While church attendance was definitely encouraged, I was not made to feel like an outsider because my family didn't go. My Mother & Father were divorced and didn't participate, but they did want me to be raised as a Catholic. I think it's more of an identity thing, it goes along with Irish and Italian and it's just something you do.
We moved to NJ at the end of 6th grade, and I was enrolled in the local public school for 7th grade. I didn't enjoy it much. I came from a K-8 school into a place where the kids were sent to a middle school for 6th, and then another middle school for 7th & 8th. At that time the 6th grade was experimental, with pods instead of classrooms. The kids left their strict elementary schools to go into that free-thinking school, only to be tossed back into a more structured middle school. I didn't know what to make of a lot of the behaviors that I witnessed, and I didn't want to stay. I asked to be put back into Catholic school.
At that point there wasn't a Catholic school in that town. They didn't have a library, either, which horrified me. In the days before the internet, before calls were all one price, and before Amazon shipped books, I was stuck in the woods with nothing to read. I was shipped off to a Catholic school about 15 miles away, clear across my town and into another. The bus ride took an hour because of the numerous stops.
I noticed right away that the school was nothing like the school I'd left in Brooklyn. Yes, we wore uniforms and said the same prayers in the morning, but after that all bets were off. There was a level of hostility I had never encountered before. Those of us who were new (even people who had been there a couple of years but not for the entire K-8 experience) were treated with disdain. Bullying was almost encouraged, and certainly no one did anything to counteract it. At this point my home life was pretty miserable, and nothing about school made it any better.
In Brooklyn we were scheduled to make our Confirmation in 7th or 8th grade. In this school, it was done in 6th, and they were extremely upset that I hadn't made mine. I was sent down to the 6th grade religion class to get ready. My Mother wasn't interested in anything to do with the school, since she was home with a young baby, and was upset that she wasn't still living in Brooklyn.
I was tortured by some of the students and one of the teachers. The two non-religious teachers were great, I'll give them that. One was lovely and encouraged my writing. The other, a math teacher, helped me get over my math fear and even put me on a Math Olympics team. Those are probably the only two positive memories I have from that year. The first teacher knew I loved to write and she would read my poetry and short stories, and share them with that second teacher. The third teacher, a nun, was the bane of my existence. Unfortunately, she was also the creative writing teacher. That nun showed such an intense dislike towards me that it was noticed by others. However, no one did anything to stop it, and I'm sure it encouraged bullying by some of the students.
I wonder if she disliked me because I refused to picket at the abortion clinic. Yes, I refused, I felt it was wrong. I also knew of one young lady in that 8th grade class who used their services, so I felt that the whole thing was hypocritical. In Brooklyn, no one had ever asked the students to participate in anything like that. During the second half of the term, she wanted us to campaign for Reagan. Why would I have campaigned for anyone at age 13? When we were assigned a term paper in history, I chose to do mine on New York, and she somehow managed to take offense to that. Again, I'm not sure what set her off, but she had issues.
Our final project for creative writing was to create a large collection of poetry, prose and other things we had written, and decorate them. I spent hours on that project, painstakingly piecing everything together. I think I worked harder on that than anything else I'd done that year. When the report cards were given out in homeroom that last week, I saw that I had failed creative writing. My homeroom teacher, the one who supported my writing, came over to me, mystified. She said "Sister ____ claimed that you never handed in the final project, but I saw you walking with it. What is she talking about?"
I answered that I had put it in the pile with everyone else's projects, and that if it were missing, so be it. I looked at her with 10 months of weariness behind me and said "none of it matters, does it? I won't be coming back, and high school is a completely different story." I was more upset that my work was gone than I was about the bad grade.
No, it was not a good year, and I thought I had forgotten much of it. I'm 47, and to look back at my 13 year old self and see how much she was hurting is painful. I was lonely and had no one to help me through. My Father was far away, my Mother was wrapped up in her own problems, and we were isolated. The one place that should have been somewhat of a haven was instead a place of misery. It was a place where one bully, whose name I don't remember, ruled the 8th grade. It was where the few of us who were different, just by virtue of not having attended that school for our entire educational career, were tortured. I can't say I was entirely surprised when I found out that one of those classmates committed suicide after graduation.
My parents offered to send me to Catholic High School, which would have meant yet another transfer to yet another town, but I declined. I figured I could make do with the local public school. I look back at high school with mixed feelings. There was much I didn't like, but I did make a life for myself. I learned skills that I took with me and still use to this day. I made friends, graduated, moved away. While I can take it or leave it in my memories, it never had the evil, insidious feeling that the 8th grade class had.
Had it been my Brooklyn Catholic School asking me to join their alumni network, I might have. I list them on Classmates and I rarely look in on an alumni group on Facebook. I may have some philosophical differences with the Catholic Church but I do value my early education and the sense of community that it brought me.
Maybe it's best if I pretend the other school never existed.
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